Critiqued Assignment #2: Irony versus Sincerity / "Eve's Purgatory"

Abstract

This is a digital photograph of Rachel Rotter's painting. It was submitted as the second critiqued assignment, "Irony versus Sincerity," on March 1, 2017 in Erin Harmon's Intermediate/Advanced Painting class. All pieces are 36x48 or larger; acrylic on canvas.The artist's statement reads: "A decapitated body, bloodied and bruised, sits at a table and stares into the audience. With nipples alert and expecting, much like the eyes might be if her head remained attached, our Eve is surrounded by vice – cigarettes, pills, alcohol, sugar. Symbols of her forgotten and fabled femininity litter the space around her, creating a world of fancy and of hell. This is not a realm that understands time, mirrored in the unnumbered clock; this is a world that understands pain, loss, and anger, marred by all things beautiful. Different hues of red encircle the canvas to underscore this blood, this pain. Disparate and loud colors, clashing against one another, echo the uncertainty of space. The notion of the spill, emanating from the wine bottle, her head and neck, melting ice cream, the nail polish, or the bloodied light oozing from the far door is also a symbol. Whether that denotes loss or something far more sinister and sexual, however, is unclear. The rapid speed of the brush stroke on the table is contrasted by the rougher and slower stroke on the skin of the body, demarcating a difference between what is plastic and what is bodily; this concept of speed is reflected throughout. Although the light above her neck wafts quietly around her frame, there is no direct light source throughout the rest of the piece. The use of clutter and of excess, themes which together create a sense of claustrophobia and asphyxiation and become apparent in the disarray of items piled atop one another, are direct references to Frida Kahlo’s body of work – although here this reference is used to a more personal end. Through the lens of irony and sincerity, this work explores disjointedness; it explores anxiety and fear and our attraction to the things which ail us; it explores femininity and its symbols as a whole. While the successes in the work relate to color, clutter, and objects as cyphers, there is room for further exploration. Next steps include building a repertoire of symbols unique to me, pushing the marriage of aggression and subtlety in color further to connote tone and mood, and confronting the vast depths of femininity by flipping our conception of womanhood on its head."